Moving Forward and Experimenting

Moving Forward and Experimenting

I’m experimenting with the Pelican blogging platform. A natural question is why use this over a well established platform like WordPress? My answer is two-fold….

First, it is minimal and fast. While the features in WordPress are great I just don’t use any of them to any great extent. I won’t complain about the sheer number of plug-ins, because in fact I think that is an obvious advantage that WordPress has over most other platforms. Countless people are adding new plug-ins, themes, and features at a non-stop pace for WordPress. A few are fantastic, and could be showcased on the basis of technical expertise, and inventiveness. In the end, on the WordPress platform I ended up playing with to many settings and got away from the purpose of using a blogging platform. The point was to deliver a message, and I fooled myself into thinking if I could just tweak this last setting that would be better than delivering information.

Secondly, and more importantly for me, Pelican is so far away from any platform I am accustom to it forces me to exercise my rusty mental muscles. The Pelican platform engine is installed on your local workstation and leverages the Python language. For example you create your blog entry in a plaintext file using the Markdown format. Pelican then processes that file and generates flat HTML files. They can then be moved to a web server of your choice. Since the files are flat, and there is no additional processing on the server, or client side, during browsing session. The entire site is super fast and efficient.

As expected there will some hurdles I will have to overcome, but I feel that is the natural part of learning any new technology.

Here is a short list:

learning Python
using Python on a Windows workstation
installing and configuring a Linux web server (Debian and Nginx if you are curious)
learning to use SSH and SCP
learning to use Markdown

I’m exited and anticipate so problems…

now let’s go play…

In case you are interested it is over at http://Pelican.JavierBarrera.com. Since it an experimental it may or may not be there…